With the growing popularity of pervasive devices and the increasing bandwidth of wireless communications, users want to have access to more services at their finger tips while traveling without a PC. For example, a mobile salesperson may need services such as company inventory lookup, customer order status check, customer address lookup, etc.
A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.
Traditionally, developers had to write a program to enable the access to a web service. For non-developers, it's very difficult for them to find a program for each web service that they need to access. Also, writing a program for each web service results in substantial cost in developing and support.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2004/0176958A1, “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MULTIMODAL SHORT-CUTS TO DIGITAL SERVICES” filed Feb. 4, 2002, incorporated herein by reference, describes a method and system for facilitating user access to services through a wireless device of a user, involves recommending to a user a subset of services from a plurality of services available to the user in which each recommended service of the subset has at least one voice short-cut associated therewith, and selecting a service to be accessed through the user's wireless device from the subset of services according to a voice command by the user corresponding to the voice short-cut of the service.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2004/0139151A1, “APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR SELECTING A WEB SERVICE IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST FROM A CLIENT DEVICE” filed Dec. 17, 2002, incorporated herein by reference, describes An apparatus and method for selecting a web service in response to a request from a client device are provided. With the apparatus and method of the present invention, when an a request is received from a client device for the invocation of a Web Services operation, the request is received in an off-ramp device coupled to an on-ramp device that provides an interface to Web Services. The off-ramp device verifies that the requested service is in a configuration file and then determines the selection scope of the desired service, as defined in the configuration file. Based on the selection scope of the desired service, the off-ramp can determine whether to perform discovery and selection of a service implementation (“request” selection scope), retrieve a service implementation from a session level cache (“session” selection scope), or retrieve a service implementation from an application level cache (“application” selection scope). If a service implementation corresponding to the requested service does not exist in the session or application level cache, the discovery and selection operations may be performed to identify a service implementation to handle the request and the service implementation may be stored in the appropriate cache.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2004/0176958A1, “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING MULTI-MODAL INTERACTIVE STREAMING MEDIA APPLICATIONS” filed Dec. 31, 2002, incorporated herein by reference, describes a method and system for facilitating user access to services through a wireless device of a user, involves recommending to a user a subset of services from a plurality of services available to the user in which each recommended service of the subset has at least one voice short-cut associated therewith, and selecting a service to be accessed through the user's wireless device from the subset of services according to a voice command by the user corresponding to the voice short-cut of the service.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2004/0030740A1 “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATING GENERATION OF WEB SERVICES FROM EXISTING SERVICE COMPONENTS” filed Aug. 9, 2002, incorporated herein by reference, describes a computer-based method for generating a Web service. The method includes identifying first and second service components for inclusion in the Web service, which includes locating available services using service detectors that use differing search techniques and displaying the located services to the user to allow the user to make a selection to identify the first and second service components. The method continues with generating a description or contract for the Web service defining service behavior including invoking rules. A transport structure is then created for accessing the new Web service such as a transmission envelope. The Web service is advertised as being available on the communications network including registering the Web service with a services registry linked to the communications network.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2003/0088421A1 “UNIVERSAL IP-BASED AND SCALABLE ARCHITECTURES ACROSS CONVERSATIONAL APPLICATIONS USING WEB SERVICES FOR SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING RESOURCES” filed Jun. 25, 2002, incorporated herein by reference, describes systems and methods for conversational computing and, in particular, to systems and methods for building distributed conversational applications using a Web Services-based model wherein speech engines (e.g., speech recognition) and audio I/O systems are programmable services that can be asynchronously programmed by an application using a standard, extensible SERCP (speech engine remote control protocol), to thereby provide scalable and flexible IP-based architectures that enable deployment of the same application or application development environment across a wide range of voice processing platforms and networks/gateways (e.g., PSTN (public switched telephone network), Wireless, Internet, and VoIP (voice over IP)). Systems and methods are further provided for dynamically allocating, assigning, configuring and controlling speech resources such as speech engines, speech pre/post processing systems, audio subsystems, and exchanges between speech engines using SERCP in a web service-based framework.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2004/0030627A1 “WEB SERVICES BROKER” filed Apr. 18, 2003, incorporated herein by reference, describes a web service broker method comprises providing an interface between an enterprise and at least one of a service client and a service provider, the service client discovering Web Services on a service registry and using corresponding Web Services from the service provider, communicating between the enterprise and the at least one of the service client and the service provider and performing at least one of a) converting information from/to the enterprise to a form appropriate for the at least one of the service client and the service provider and b) converting information from/to the at least one of the service client and the service provider to a form appropriate for the enterprise.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2002/0174117A1 “MOBILE WEB SERVICES” filed May 15, 2001, incorporated herein by reference, describes a method is disclosed to enable a mobile phone or wireless PDA to discover Internet businesses and services by accessing the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry. The method facilitates the formation of a query to the UDDI registry for the wireless device user. The method constructs a personal user profile of the user's UDDI searching strategies and Internet accessing preferences. The user profile can be used as a shortcut for online or offline queries to the UDDI registry or for accessing pages from web sites, in response to the user's entry of abbreviated inputs to the wireless device. The method is embodied as programmed instructions which may be executed within the user's wireless device to query the UDDI registry. Alternately, method is embodied as programmed instructions which may be executed within a separate knowledge engine server to query the UDDI registry in response to commands from the user's wireless device. The server can be used to cache files accessed from web sites, for selective forwarding to the user's wireless device.
Browsers do not provide a means to access Web Services directly. Customized Web pages and programs have to be developed for each web service to be accessed. This results in substantial cost in developing and support. Furthermore, using a browser to access Web Services from web pages involves extra network RTT (round trip time) as the customized web page and programs must be downloaded before the browser is capable of accessing the Web Service. With the communication bandwidth limitation on pervasive devices, extra RTT has undesirable impact on the performance of the system.
Another approach is to make a customized client application that talks to the service for each web service. The disadvantage of this approach is that eventually the number of applications will outgrow the memory/storage limit of the device as the services increase. The total cost to develop, support and purchase each application is substantial.